You might have jumped on the e-commerce bandwagon with the hope of reaching more customers and growing your business at exponential rate. That sounds absolutely justified as too many so called local businesses with limited customer outreach could make themselves flashy brands in too less time. Well, most of these e-commerce store success stories follow some time tested ground rules and principles that are valid till date.
Do you want to know what it takes for a new online e-commerce store to increase sales and return on investment exponentially? Well, here we explain some of the time tested principles that can make huge difference in your growth story and business returns.
Fundamentals of Sales and ROI in an Online E-Commerce Store
1. Upsell and cross sell the products
Often at the end of making an online purchase decision when you are about to make the payment you get such messages urging you to buy some more products with a subtle push like “People frequently buy together these items” or “People who buy this also bought these”. This is an instance of upselling.
Do you know upselling is one of the most effective techniques for most e-commerce store including the largest and the smaller ones? Upscaling is already embraced by most stores for faster business conversion. Now, you can do this in two distinct manners. You can either prescribe them related products or products close to the price range.
2. Targeting the existing customers
For every businesses the existing customers work like the ready in hand reserve of prospects. If you have trouble growing your business which happens for many businesses initially, existing customers come to aid to push sales.
Existing customers have a higher conversion rate and they visit often and buy more products than first timers. But targeting existing customers requires a well planned retention strategy. The best way to retain customers would be launching a customer loyalty program. With such program you can reward them every time they shop from the store or recommend another buyer. You can also unleash a loyalty point system and allow them to redeem the points for their purchases or other type discounts.
3. Describe products with interesting video
Most people love to get educated about a product with a quick video rather than going through large body of texts. This is precisely why video demonstration of products are so popular across social channels and online e-commerce store. Moreover, with Video demo You can actually help your customers spending more time on your site.
Videos also work as great ads for promoting the same product across other channels. Lastly, video makes an impression that lasts longer with customers to push them to visit the store and see the product in more details.
4. Address the customers who left abandoned carts
As various studies revealed, for every 100 visitors at least 60 to 70 of them leave their shopping carts in the middle of their purchase. This makes many e-commerce businesses lose money. It happens because, products in abandoned carts are often counted to show the available number minus the ones in carts. Naturally, lack of availability for certain items are caused by these abandoned carts making digital e-commerce store lose money.
In most cases customers leave their carts just because of the product price and additional costs that are added in the way of taxes, packaging or delivery cost. Many customers also leave carts when comparing the same with a lucrative offer in a different store.
How can you reduce this rate of people leaving the carts? The best way to push people follow their carts is to send them follow-up emails. You can also incentivize the second purchase of any of your customer.
5. Rigorous social media presence
Social media platforms are already business platforms for many brands and products. This new way of promoting e-commerce products is called social commerce. It is now a driving force for many brand’s social media presence. Facebook leads the bandwagon of social commerce followed by Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube and Reddit as the channels for delivering business. Many businesses even depends solely on Facebook for product promotion.
The social commerce offered the so called small businesses a unique and inexpensive way to promote their products and services. But social commerce needs consistent and continuous presence with relevant posts and conversation. That can help your brand build a community who takes interest in your products.
6. Affiliate marketing
Affiliate associates are popularly used by many brands to promote their products against commissions and incentives. This actually means sharing a part of your profits with the affiliates but it works great to bring you customers and sales.
Some of the effective ways to ensure effective affiliate program include the following:
- Make in-depth research and determine to what extent joining an affiliate can positively affect your sales and inbound customers.
- Now decide whether to take help from a network like Commission Junction to track commissions for affiliates or utilize your own system in place..
- Now find reputed affiliates in your product niche.
- Pay the affiliates well to ensure a happy partnership getting you business month after month. Normally, affiliate payment remains much less than the advertising budget.
- Make sure to make a contract with affiliate mentioning about tracking the links on their website, blog or landing pages.
7. Integrate Instagram
Instagram is now one of the most high value channels for product marketing. The average order value that Instagram marketing generates is $65.00 and it is the highest among all social channels. So, visitors on Instagram are more susceptible to make purchases than on other channels. If this is not enough, Instagram offers at least 25% more engagement than all other social media channels. Naturally, for a web store integrating Instagram in the scheme of things for marketing is quite obvious.
How to make your product campaign go big on Instagram? Well, there are some ground rules like using the right hashtags, offering relevant filters, consistent and right timed posting, etc. Apart from all these, user generated contents are known to make big difference for brands on Instagram. Particularly user generated photos showing your customers using or posing with your products work great on Instagram to push business conversion.
8. Send Wishlist reminder emails
Just like abandoned carts, wish lists of online visitors that remain there motionless is a common phenomenon experiencing by many web stores worldwide. To push the sales of those products you need to send Wishlist reminder emails.
Reminding customers of the products in their Wishlist can work like a trigger to make sales. You can also use Wishlist reminder app to automate sending emails to visitors with Wishlist shown with their accounts.
9. Conversion Rate Optimization
We are already familiar with the term as it is part of common terms used by major brands when pushing for sales with their online efforts. This is particularly applicable for e-commerce brands that get more than 600 transactions per month. This is a great way to push growth for e-commerce companies.
This process of conversion rate optimization requires collection and analysis of qualitative and quantitative data to know the reason for bounce rate and lower sales figure compared to the site visitors. When the data guides you about specific problems with the UX, you can incorporate design changes and conduct A/B testing to see what works well for better engagement and business conversion.
10. Build traffic through SEO
Finally, like all websites your e-commerce store also needs SEO push to increase visitor footfall. The most important thing to start with your e-commerce SEO is about backlinks. Quality backlinks of websites with higher domain authority (commonly referred as DA which is a metrics launched by SEO MOZ and regarded by Google for page ranking) can give your website a push in search ranks for relevant keywords.
Apart from this, you need to perfect your technical SEO with right use of keywords, page description, internal linking, a site structure friendly for search engine crawlers, fast loading pages, ease of use and accessibility, etc.
In Conclusion
Do you want to make sure you do not miss out any of these opportunities for optimizing your business conversion and sales? Come to The App Ideas, an expert e-commerce website development company with years of experience in boosting sales for e-commerce websites. We are just a phone call or a message away!
Would you like to create an e-Commerce store? feel free to contact us.
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